Content Strategy articles

It’s no secret that having a custom domain name is an essential piece of any company’s branding strategy. While there are a myriad of hosting plans available that offer domains like your company.webhost.com, making the shift from one of those to simply yourcompany.com is an important step. However, your domain branding strategy need not end there. Domain mapping offers an opportunity for web developers and online business owners the...

It brings with it a host of benefits. UGC can greatly increase engagement with websites, as well as shareability and authenticity. Of course, along with benefits are a host of pitfalls, from having to take the time to moderate content, to establishing an engaged community to submit the content in the first place. It’s important to know the pitfalls of user generated content and how they can be avoided. With a clear strategy, and contingency...

Inclusive web design is more than just building a website that’s accessible for impaired individuals. Inclusivity means creating an environment (physical or digital) that’s welcoming of all people regardless of their: Age; Race; Ethnicity; Gender; Sexual orientation; Socioeconomic status; Body shape; Physical or mental impairment; And so on… But let’s be honest: it’s not always easy to find photos that feel inclusive —...

Designing mid-level feature pages is one of the hardest parts of building or revamping your website. How do you divide your business into neat, tidy sections? How many categories should you use? Does it make sense to combine this feature with that one? How do you find the optimal balance of text, images and graphics? What keywords should you target? Are you building these pages for humans to buy your products or search engine crawlers to rank...

Thankfully, you no longer have to rely on a resume to try to communicate how talented you are to others. Your skills as a freelancer should be shared with others through visual media. It makes a lot more sense than writing up a one page summary that says, “I graduated from so-and-so university in 2010 and worked as a designer for XYZ Agency for three years.” Yes, your history is important, but not as much as what you’re able to do with the knowledge...

Thinking about doing some blogging for your business? That’s a good idea. Content marketing is one of the best ways to establish credibility and authority, regardless of what kind of business you run. So, how do you decide where to publish your content?  Medium was the platform of choice for some time. Everyone from the hobbyist blogger to the major corporation was publishing content there. Considering it was built specifically as a blogging...

Pop quiz: which of the following statements is sarcastic? Edge is actually a kind of decent browser, just missing some features. Writing CSS using JavaScript is a viable and sensible way to get things done, now that we use JS for everything else. We might as well. Brutalism as a movement has, in some ways, made some of us into better designers. It can be hard to tell, can’t it? For the record, it’s number 2. But really, you might have seen people...

Whether you are an established brand or a startup, content marketing is one thing you should be thinking about. In fact, 98% of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are advocating for the trend and their reasoning is simple; it works. In recent years, many startup founders have talked about how sales of their products skyrocketed after being featured in popular websites like Techcrunch and Business Insider. So, without beating around the bush,...

For one reason or another, you may find yourself wanting to publish things online anonymously. Now to some, the “A-word” conjures up images of hackers, Guy Fawkes masks, and people generally saying terrible things to each other on Twitter. There’s long been an ongoing debate about whether anonymity is something that should even be allowed on the Internet. Yes. Yes it should. There’s no doubt that there are terrible people in the world;...

Ah, kids…The light of our lives. They bring joy, fulfillment, laughter, and love. Then they start crying, and I hand them right back to their parents. Don’t get me wrong. I like children in the abstract. I believe they are the future, and so they should be protected and nurtured…elsewhere. I’ve even been given responsibility over large numbers of them for hours at a time, back in my old missionary days. It still happens sometimes, because...

As a UX writer, it’s my job to know how to create web copy that convinces readers to take action. That said, it doesn’t matter how engaging of a story I craft for my clients’ web pages or blog posts. If what I’ve written looks terrible on the page, no one will bother to read it. Here’s the problem though: UX writers are not designers. No matter how many short sentences we write to succinctly communicate a point or jargon-free copy we craft...

When we look at the very best content, it’s almost always about telling a story: From memorable TV adverts that run like a romantic mini series to sophisticated modern content campaigns that draw on the user community for experiences, the straight narrative provides the kind of emotional connection that builds a great brand. Websites in particular can benefit by placing storytelling and narrative techniques at their heart: this allows...

Running low on content ideas? User-generated content (UGC) is becoming a more and more popular means of filling company websites. When used correctly, it can actually end up adding a near endless, high-quality stream of relevant content for your business to use. Of course, figuring out the right way to incorporate user-generated content into your site or blog can be a real challenge. It has to be done in a way that engages your audience while...

Every day, thousands—if not millions—of people are all asking themselves the same, simple question: what do I post now? If you’ve been reading for a while, you know what I’m getting at. Regular content: It’s good for your website’s soul. Also its relevance. But what if I told you that you didn’t have to write anything for yourself at all? What if I told you that there are thousands—if not millions—of hard-working people getting...

In a recent post, I discussed how caution needs to be taken when designing websites for a global audience. Different cultures perceive things like color quite differently from one another. Devices that might be popular in one region of the world might not be used in another. And the customs each country has—even for something as seemingly insignificant as filling out a contact form—can vary greatly. Needless to say, global web design...

Before you ever sit down to design a website for a client, you develop user personas that are representative of their target audience. Once you’ve established an identity for the main user (or users), you can more easily shape an experience that caters to their needs and motivations. But what do you do when the target audience isn’t so clearly defined into one or two neatly packaged personas? Take a website like Zappos, for instance. Zappos...

They say that an image is worth a thousand words, and web designers certainly seem to have taken it to heart: the trend for image-rich, stylised page design means that there is now often little room for writing on a web page. Looking at recent trends in web design, we see full-screen photos, minimalist split-screens and enticing overlays. It’s all very visual, and not one of the examples contains many words on the featured pages. These trends...

Exposure. Engagement. Interaction. Trolls calling you horrible things in real time. You can have all of these buzzwords and more through the magic of live streaming over the Internet! It’s not all that bad, actually. In a world where video has become increasingly dominant online, more and more people are going one step further by consuming their video live. It’s kind of like television, only it’s easier to find stuff that’s relevant...

“Why isn’t my site ranking in searches? Why has traffic not improved since we hired you? Calls from customers are actually down... do you even know what you’re doing?!” Ah…the music of irate customers, whose site you have lovingly designed and crafted only to see it filled with insipid writing so bad and error strewn, that it is actually putting customers off the company. The Internet is still littered with examples of slick-looking...

There’s an old saying about dresses and speeches which rightly points out that both should be long enough to cover the subject. In the modern era, men in particular would be well advised to drop all reference to female attire and talk about blogs instead. How long should a blog be? The infinite Internet has done away with strict word counts and in theory, every online article can be as long as the author feels necessary to get their point across....

Recently I have encountered more and more people asking for one specific thing: words, and lots of them. No, truly, I mean a lot of them. They want long-form content: articles that go from 2,000 to 5,000 words, and sometimes longer. Then I ran across our glorious lea... ahem... Zeldman’s article on the subject of long-form content, and the challenges of designing for it. I am not one to shy away from a challenge, but I was curious to know why. The...